Photo: Reuters / File
Photo: Reuters / File

After more than two months of brinksmanship, it appears the circus has packed its bags as the summer-long Himalayan impasse between China and India looks to be officially over. With the aggressors having been unable to agree on a narrative about its onset, the manner of its dialling down looks to be similarly unclear, but – for now, at least – there is an “understanding.”

India said on Monday that an agreement had been reached with China, following talks, and that both sides were pulling back their border forces from the Doklam plateau, an area that is claimed by both China and Bhutan, long a strategic partner of its neighbor to the south.

“Following diplomatic communications,” read a statement from New Delhi yesterday, “expeditious disengagement of border personnel of China and India at the face-off site” was ongoing.

The stand-off began on June 16 when Chinese soldiers, convinced they were on Chinese territory, found their attempts to extend a road at Doklam, near the tri-junction between India, Bhutan and China, thwarted by Indian soldiers. As both camps dug in their heels, the ensuing diplomatic crisis came to be portrayed as the worst in decades between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

For its part, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced yesterday only that China was “pleased” India had “withdrawn,” adding that it would “continue to exercise its sovereign rights” over the plateau. Indian government officials whispered anonymously that China had backed off too, taking its road-building apparatus with it, although none of this has actually been confirmed.

China had repeatedly said India must withdraw its troops before any negotiations could take place, while India had insisted both sides should withdraw their forces together. In the event, it appears likely that some compromise was struck, possibly relating to some peripheral matter such as China’s growing relationship with Pakistan. Either way, it is significant that de-escalation has been achieved without loss of face for either party.

Throughout the crisis, India’s notoriously bellicose media appeared to exhibit a remarkably composed streak in the face of provocative rhetoric from China’s state-owned sentinels – albeit under almost certain pressure from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s slick media managers. That being so, it has not been slow, with the troops now gone from Doklam, to condemn China’s conduct in attempting to “bully” other countries.

Accusing China of “bare-knuckled policies” and “historic revisionism”, an editorial in the Times of India by columnnist Rajeev Deshpande suggests New Delhi’s “resolve” offers a lesson to other countries in how to resist Chinese aggression. He writes: “The Doklam saga will encourage countries like Vietnam, Mongolia, Singapore and Japan that have been pushing back at China, and cause others like Philippines, who looked as if they might cave in, to reconsider.”

Meanwhile, Dhruva Jaishankar, a foreign policy fellow with Brookings India, told AFP that India had achieved its objective by forcing China to step back from its contentious road project. “The Chinese side is going to focus on the fact that the Indian troops have withdrawn,” he said. “(But) ultimately the issue is whether this road gets built or not, and it appears that it won’t be the case.”

What’s certainly clear is that India has no appetite for being pushed around by its increasingly hegemonic neighbor. Given China’s ambitions forth of its borders – not least in terms of building connectivity and strategic alliances in areas of land and sea that India is accustomed to viewing as its own sphere of influence – future flashpoints seem inevitable. But whether the stand-off at Doklam comes to be viewed as a phony prelude to some more heated conflict or a footnote in a coming trajectory of greater bilateral co-operation, the fact that no shots were fired in this little summer contretemps suggest both sides have at least weighed the risks attached.

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